As optical systems continue to increase the volume and speed of information communicated, the need for methods and apparatus operable to facilitate high speed optical signal processing also escalates. Router and switch cores performing optical switching generally implement schedulers to assist in avoiding contention for common system resources. In prior approaches, there has generally been a tension between the complexity of the scheduler used and the delay experienced in the switching fabric. More complex schedulers generally require significant system resources and can be difficult to implement. Trivial schedulers, while simple to implement, have generally resulted in unsatisfactory switching delays.